yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Saving Albatross Chicks From Tsunamis and Rising Seas | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

The Laysan albatross chicks that we're raising, they have a lot of personality. When you first look at them, you wouldn't realize how much variation there is among different birds, but there really is. A feisty one, aren't you? Yeah, he's got lots of energy. Be like him. Five is next.

Oh, hey buddy! This one is a... I know, buddy! You'll be pretty when you grow up, I promise.

There are more than a million of them worldwide, but about 98% of them nest in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, most of which have a maximum elevation of about two or three meters. In 2011, the tsunami from Japan wiped out tens of thousands of nests, and even before that, in the same year, there was a high wave event that wiped out tens of thousands more. Most people are not aware of that, and that's expected to happen with increasing frequency. The islands that most Laysan albatrosses nest on may not be here that much longer.

One way to combat that is to try to create new colonies on higher islands. We're trying to create a new colony on the North Shore of Oahu by moving eggs from Kauai, where they come from a military base where they nest next to an active runway, and they're an airstrike hazard with the aircraft. So, we take those eggs, move them to Oahu, we place them temporarily in foster nests, and then once the chicks hatch, we move them to the refuge and raise them by hand for five months.

But the hope is that they will then imprint on that site, and then when they're adults themselves in a few years, return to that site and begin nesting there. It's gonna take a long time, but I like to think about the fact that ten, fifteen years from now, we'll have an albatross population based on what we're doing now. And I think that's really special because that's gonna be a population that's well above sea level rise for a long time.

When we start losing the land on the northwestern islands, we're doing something now or getting ahead of the game. A lot of conservation work has to be reactionary in nature; people identify a problem or a threat and try to do something about it, and that's understandable. In most cases, that's required. But there are some threats that we know about already. We know it's going to be a problem, and I think it's important to try to be proactive about trying to address some of these threats before it's an emergency.

People come in from the five boroughs, they come in with a bird in hand, and they've gone to a great deal of trouble to find us. Would they take off half the day to rescue this bird?

More Articles

View All
Innovation Requires Decentralization and a Frontier
Innovation requires a couple of things. One of the things that it seems to require is decentralization. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Athenian city-states, the Italian city-states, or even the United States, when it was more free-form and invo…
The Surprising Secret of Synchronization
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that everything in the universe tends towards disorder. And in complex systems, chaos is the norm. So you’d naturally expect the universe to be messy. And yet, we can observe occasions of spontaneous order: the sy…
Humanity's Greatest Journey
It’s time. Let’s reveal the 12,025 Human Era Calendar. Let’s travel back 200,000 years to humanity’s greatest journey that took our ancestors from East Africa all across the planet. With nothing on their feet and only primitive tools, they set out to cro…
Adding vectors in magnitude and direction form | Vectors | Precalculus | Khan Academy
We’re told that vector A has magnitude 4 in direction 170 degrees from the positive x-axis. Vector B has magnitude 3 in direction 240 degrees from the positive x-axis. Find the magnitude and direction of vector A plus vector B. So pause this video and see…
You need to talk to your users. #entrepreneur #startup #tech
Most people in the world have the idea on how new startups are formed completely wrong. They think ideas of new products are something the fantasies come up with on a lazy Sunday or a late night coding session. You probably know it doesn’t work this way. …
NERD WARS: Boba Fett vs. Deadpool
This is Jeff Wman. I don’t know where Adam is, but we’re bringing you another Nerd Wars. This one’s coming from hello, Master Chief. It’s Boba Fett versus Deadpool. I will do the opening gambit right here. There’s no way that Boba Fett could stop Deadpoo…